In Terms Of

Tag: Collectors

  • The Money Pit

    Collecting the “Uncollectible”: Earth and Site-Specific Sculpture
    Thursday, May 23, 2019
    Center for the History of Collecting, Frick Art Reference Library, Frick Collection, New York

    In November 1973, Walter De Maria wrote to his former dealer, Virginia Dwan, seeking funds to create a second, larger version of 35-Pole Lightning Field, a work of Land art that he had erected near Flagstaff, Arizona, earlier that year with Dwan’s financing but later dismantled. During her keynote lecture at “Collecting the ‘Uncollectible’: Earth and Site-Specific Sculpture,” a half-day symposium held at the Frick Collection, New York, on May 23, art historian Suzaan Boettger quoted from the letter: “I have come to realize that the land or earth movement as a whole is best advanced through fewer major statements rather than a profusion of smaller ones.”

    Dwan turned De Maria down, but he eventually found another patron—the Dia Art Foundation—for The Lightning Field (1977), his monumental artwork in the western New Mexico desert. The artist also got his wish. As Kirsten Swenson noted in a 2012 essay in Art in America, any survey of twentieth-century American art will likely represent the movement with the same set of works: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), and De Maria’s The Lightning Field, a triumvirate of “major statements” that have become synonymous with Land art as a whole. The symposium, which addressed the commissioning, collecting, and maintenance of large-scale outdoor sculpture, did not stray far from De Maria’s conceit, reducing the wide-ranging Land art movement to a few consequential practitioners and patrons.

    Dia, which now administers two of these three sites (the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, oversees Double Negative), as well as other monumental works like Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), located in the Great Basin Desert in Utah, and De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977), was prominently represented at the symposium, reflecting the institution’s success in positioning itself as virtually synonymous with Land art and its administration. Aside from Boettger and collector Jarl Mohn, all of the speakers had direct ties to Dia: participants included the foundation’s director, Jessica Morgan; two Dia curators, Alexis Lowry and Kelly Kivland; and board chair emeritus Leonard Riggio. Another participant, curator James Meyer of the National Gallery of Art, recently served as Dia’s deputy director and chief curator. The lone artist speaker, Michelle Stuart, currently has a work—Sayreville Strata Quartet (1976), a set of monochromes made by breaking apart rocks from an abandoned quarry and vigorously rubbing the sediment onto muslin-backed paper—on long-term view at Dia:Beacon.

    Since the late 1960s, the conventional narrative around Earthworks has been that they are difficult to access and experience in person because of their remote locations, and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to sell. Artists offered documentary materials for gallery display—maps, written descriptions, photographs—but these were considered poor substitutes for actual work. This notion went largely unchallenged during the symposium: The Earthwork was ordinarily bound to its place, Meyer said during his talk. “It was unmovable and therefore unexchangeable. It could not take on what Marx called exchange-value—it couldn’t be moved around, bought and sold.”

    However, the land on which an Earthwork is situated can be sold in a real-estate transaction. Because Meyer and his fellow symposium participants focused narrowly on access and patronage, they sidestepped thornier issues of control. Smithson’s Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971), for instance, constructed in a sand quarry in the Netherlands as part of an outdoor sculpture exhibition called Sonsbeek ’71, remains in private hands. The quarry’s owner, Gerard de Boer, whose father agreed to host (and pay for) the work nearly fifty years ago, told the New York Times in 2017 that he wants to sell the business but also find a custodian for the artwork. The buyer of one may not be interested in the other.

    Other works have even more complex ownership structures. Smithson’s estate gifted Spiral Jetty to Dia in 1999 but retains the copyright to the work. Neither institution owns the physical land, which the foundation leases from the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands. Meanwhile, Heizer executed his series Nine Nevada Depressions (1968) on government property near the Nevada-California border. Since Heizer created the works without permission, could he have been prosecuted for trespassing and vandalism? Do the “depressions” belong to the heirs of collector Robert Scull, who financed them, or, since federal land is publicly owned, to all Americans?

    If their works couldn’t be easily sold, how did Land artists make a living? Someone had to fork over cash for the machinery and materials necessary to create these works. Two names came up repeatedly: Virginia Dwan, who was scheduled to speak at the symposium but ultimately didn’t appear, and Scull, who died in 1985. Whereas Dwan’s position as an independently wealthy gallery owner enabled her artists to operate on a grand scale, Smithson’s next dealer, John Weber, was a man of lesser means who, in Boettger’s words, “did not give grubstakes for Earthworks.” Though none of the speakers at “Collecting the ‘Uncollectible’” admitted it, their presentations clearly privileged subsidized, completed works over proposals. Artists unaffiliated with Dwan or Scull—such as Dennis Oppenheim, Will Insley, and Terry Fugate-Wilcox, among others—devised plans and built scale models for outdoor sculptures that, due to a lack of funding, were never fully realized.

    During her conversation with Dia curator Kelly Kivland, Michelle Stuart said that although her German dealer connected her with collectors, she scraped by on public grants and private fellowships throughout the 1970s. She depended on voluntary labor to complete Niagara Gorge Path Relocated (1975) for Artpark in upstate New York and worked with a miniscule $2,000 budget to complete Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns (1979) in Oregon. In contrast, better-known male artists encountered fewer restrictions and reaped larger rewards. Heizer has worked on City, a massive installation in the Nevada desert, for forty-seven years, accepting millions of dollars from collectors and institutions, including Dia. Boettger noted that James Turrell’s Roden Crater is a “cash cow” that, since the mid-1970s, “has received funding from the NEA, every major foundation, [and] many private collectors such as Count Panza.” Kanye West gave $10 million to Turrell last December. Despite this lavish support, both City and Roden Crater remain unfinished.

    Even when artists managed to find sufficient funding to execute their plans, these works require ongoing maintenance, as conservator Rosa Lowinger made clear when describing her firm’s efforts to preserve concrete boxes by Donald Judd in Marfa, public sculptures by Roy Lichtenstein and Ann Norton in Miami, and Holt’s Sun Tunnels. Whereas Holt consulted a team of experts in various fields (including astronomy, construction, and engineering) when planning her work, other artists were less concerned with longevity, making efforts to preserve them more complicated. Sabato “Simon” Rodia, for instance, erected his Watts Towers between 1921 and the mid-1950s idiosyncratically, with no central plan or style. The City of Los Angeles now owns the work and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is its steward. “They have a permanent team onsite,” Lowinger said, “just to do constant maintenance” on a work that cannot be brought “to a state of equilibrium.”

    Many works of Land art, such as Stuart’s Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns, were never intended to last. For others one must ask: when does the perpetual cost of care exceed an artwork’s value? In other words, when does an Earthwork become a money pit? Though patrons like Dwan and Scull helped artists to realize ambitious projects, Land art also encompassed many other smaller-scale gestures that lasted for hours or days, not for decades. Because the symposium focused so narrowly on these Dia-approved figures, it felt more like a consolidation of the foundation’s influence over the movement’s history than a diligent exploration of collecting difficult art.

    In Terms Of count: 10.

    Source

    This review was originally published by Art in America on June 28, 2019.

    Read

    Andy Battaglia, “‘The Story of Our Civilization’: Land Art Symposium Explores Earthy Tales of ‘Uncollectibility,’” ARTnews, May 29, 2019.

    Brian Boucher, “‘We Shouldn’t Own These Things’: Five Takeaways from a Landmark Conference on Collecting Land Art,” Artnet News, May 27, 2019.

    Scott Indrisek, “The Market for Land Art Challenges Us to Think about Collecting Differently,” Artsy, June 20, 2019.

    Watch

    The Frick Collection has posted video from the symposium.

  • Landscape Surveyors

    The Changing Landscape of Museums Today
    Thursday, January 29, 2015
    Asia Society, Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium, New York

    Melissa Chiu, ed., Making a Museum in the 21st Century (2015)

    A panel on “The Changing Landscape of Museums Today” coincided with the release of the Asia Society Museum’s anthology of essays, Making a Museum in the 21st Century. Responding to a question asked by Josette Sheeran, president and chief executive officer of the Asia Society—“What does a successful museum look like in the twenty-first century?”—the museum directors Richard Armstrong and Melissa Chiu talked about collections, buildings, and exhibitions, while the bureaucrat Tom Finkelpearl zeroed in on diversity and audience.

    The event’s moderator, Peggy Loar, interim vice president for global arts and culture and museum director at the Asia Society, described the mission of the Institute of Museum Service (now the Institute of Museums and Library Services), where she worked from 1977 to 1980. In its early days this federal agency provided grant for general operating expenses. At the time, Loar said, museums were failing because of business mismanagement, low community engagement, and the lack of a clearly defined vision. Those that thrived, she continued, did so because of passion, collecting, education, community, and economic strength. Innovative institutions are built, renamed, reformed, and reinvented, but she wants to know if they are now overreaching. China boasts four thousand museums, Loar told us, with one hundred new ones opening each year. Among the issues in the East and throughout the world are migration, urbanization, demographics, and technology. In other words, the same issues museums have faced for decades.

    Building and Expansion

    Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and its foundation since 2008, surveyed the history of his institution—a presentation he’s probably given many times. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the first in today’s global chain, was founded in 1939 in a former car showroom in midtown Manhattan and moved into the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building twenty years later. Armstrong described how the museum’s namesake founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim, and its first director, Hilla Rebay, believed that “abstract art and its deep contemplation … was the best way to change human behavior,” a socially edifying position with a reformist instinct that Armstrong called “a highly Teutonic idea.” He also noted the foundation’s prescient vision for a networked institution—geographically, that is—with the addition of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection in Venice, which opened in 1949.

    Richard Armstrong oversees the Guggenheim Museum franchise (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    The Guggenheim franchises around the world—operating at various times in New York, Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, and Las Vegas, among other locations—are known not only for their collections and exhibitions but also for their architecture. According to Armstrong, the Bilbao branch designed by Frank Gehry is “the most significant museum building in the second half of the twentieth century,” a claim with which few would argue. He also said the Guggenheim’s buildings have inspired artists to readjust their exhibition practice, as was the case with Richard Serra in Bilbao and Maurizio Cattelan in New York.

    Like Armstrong, Melissa Chiu, who left the directorship of the Asia Society last year to lead the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, offered the background for her institution, which she called “the other round building.” The museum’s founder, Joseph Hirshhorn, was a New Yorker who made his fortune in uranium mining. He also collected art in depth, Chiu said, and wasn’t afraid to ask dealers for a discount. The museum bearing his name began with a donation of six thousand works from the Hirshhorn collection; ground broke for the building on the Mall in 1969 and opened five years later. Like the Guggenheim, Chiu said, living artists such as Ai Weiwei and Doug Aitken have responded to the museum’s curved walls; curators have also creatively installed historical works by Yves Klein and Andy Warhol. The museum’s crescent shape even changed the way the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto presented his own work in other exhibitions, Chiu noted.

    Melissa Chiu explains how artists have used the Hirshhorn Museum building in creative ways (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    Diversity and Inclusivity

    Tom Finkelpearl, who last year was appointed commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, launched into a discussion of diversity, reminding the audience that while New York has a “majority minority” population—65 percent people of color, he said, depending on how you count Latino—over 90 percent of museum visitors and workers are white. When Finkelpearl began his twelve-year stint as director of the Queens Museum in 2002, he realized that nobody on the “upstairs staff” or in its circle spoke Spanish or Mandarin as a first language. Since Corona and Flushing, the museum’s adjacent neighborhoods, are overwhelmingly Latino and Asian, this was a problem. “What did it mean,” he asked, “to have a staff that couldn’t even literally communicate” with its immediate constituency? As a consequence, Finkelpearl reorganized his major departments, making public events and community engagement as important as educational and curatorial programming. And instead of hiring museum experts for the new roles, he solicited professional organizers trained in “interactive, participatory community building.”

    Tom Finkelpearl laments the lack of racial and ethnic diversity on museums staffs in New York (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    Stating the lack of black leadership in American museums, Finkelpearl advocated a closer look at the pipeline of PhD students that are future institutional leaders. People tend to hire those that mirror themselves, he said during the audience Q&A, but the Queens Museum made a “concerted effort from the top” to generate a diverse group of finalists for jobs (over 50 percent were people of color). While Finkelpearl praised the advances women have made into the top positions at many museums, he indicated that we still have a long way to go.

    From the Ground Up

    Opening the discussion among the panelists, Loar said that Guggenheim expansion projects have been controversial. (In fact, the architect and critic Michael Sorkin has called the practice “Starbucks museology.” How does the board make decisions for expansion, she asked. Armstrong said he meets franchise seekers about once a month, but the proposals are not always feasible. And Helsinki is the only proposal he has been involved in since its inception, he explained, noting that the Finnish capital had four advantages: a proximity to Russia, technological capacity, leadership, and economic need. About 1,700 architects entered the open call for a Helsinki building, Armstrong said, and six finalists were chosen to advance. An exhibition will present their work to the public and then politicians cast their vote—“That’s the mechanics of how the decision gets made.” Armstrong didn’t have much to say about criticism for the Abu Dhabi branch, a work in progress that the group Gulf Labor has been monitoring and protesting.1

    Loar asked the three panelists about private museums with limited public agendas, an issue recently explored in a New York Times article on art collectors who establish their nonprofits and foundations, often on property adjacent to their home or office, and receive tax exemptions for the housing, maintenance, and conservation of their private art collections. “I think the problem goes back to about the twelfth century,” Armstrong joked. Not all new museums will survive, he continued, and personally wished the Guggenheim were less expensive for visitors. (He later disclosed that one-time visitors keep the museum solvent, but local audiences—about 40 percent of the total—are a “more sensitive type of plant” that must be engaged differently.) Though Armstrong acknowledged that we live in a gilded age, he felt—quite inexplicably to me—that “it’s not good for people like us who like art to be criticizing collectors.” Chiu claimed that single collectors who founded institutions, like Hirshhorn, were interested in the public good. “It’s an evolutionary process” for the private to become public. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t watch these vanity projects like hawks.

    Peggy Loar interviews the panelists (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    Museum growth is predicted for regions outside Europe and North America, with new buildings being erected, Chiu reported, in the Middle East, India, and Singapore. “China is another matter, is it not?” Loar asked. Chiu noted that the culture of American museums—with private philanthropy supporting an entire museum’s infrastructure—is an anomaly in the world. None of the panelists, through, established if the building boom in China is public or private. In places like Shanghai, she continued, it is hard to ignore new museum development because of its large scale and fast pace. China boasts entire cities that did not exist twenty-five years ago, Finkelpearl said, and Westerners are baffled by the cultural planning developed concurrently with other municipal infrastructure. What took 1,500 years to grow in Europe, he said, now happens in 1,500 days.

    Locations and Audience

    While Finkelpearl noted how art neighborhoods develop organically in New York, Armstrong claimed that a homegrown arts community isn’t necessary for the success of museums, giving Oklahoma City and Kansas City as examples. Loar added that a sense of local community pride could eventually develop for a new institution. Moreover, museums may follow different models or invent their own. Finkelpearl flipped an audience member’s question about a Vietnamese art museum’s limited resources, arguing that we’re presupposing the West has better museological knowledge and knows the right way to implement it. Instead, he wondered, what can we learn from them?

    Armstrong said the Guggenheim is no longer “obsessed with Europe and America” and reiterated his institution’s commitment to Asian art, mentioning a few recent exhibitions, such as shows of the work of the Indian artist Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde and the Chinese artist Wang Jianwei. The Guggenheim, he noted, is also actively buying the work of artists from across the United Arab Emirates for the Abu Dhabi branch. In her own backyard, Chiu said that two of the Hirshhorn’s five curators are Asian: Melissa Ho and Mika Yoshitake (who organized the excellent survey on the Japanese avant-garde group Mono-ha for the Los Angeles–based commercial gallery Blum and Poe in 2012). At her museum Chiu wants to place Asian art in a broader story of modern art, beyond New York and Paris, since art movements in the 1960s and 1970s were “truly global.”

    Education and Experience

    Learning, access, and social justice are important museum issues for the next decade, according to one audience member. Finkelpearl agreed, saying that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has budgeted $23 million to improve a lagging arts education in New York, which includes an infusion of art, dance, music, and theater teachers. Tourism is also important to the city, he acknowledged, but then quipped, “How many people got into the arts because it was going to be good for the economy?” The audience laughed, of course. Seriously, though, Finkelpearl meant to emphasize how government has an inherent interest in community, and the mayor has even commissioned a major study to measure the impact of the arts.

    Tom Finkelpearl explains Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to fill New York City schools with art teachers (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    The idea of a shift in art museums—and in culture at large—from object to experience was folded into a conversation about museum education. Finkelpearl said that a focus on experience doesn’t abandon collections, scholarship, and connoisseurship but rather indicates a fuller recognition of the people who visit museums. “That’s [traditionally] been the purview of the education department,” he said and boldly proposed that “the avant-garde in museums is shifting to the education departments,” where warm, inviting teachers are eclipsing the authority of gatekeeper curators. That sounded nice, but I would argue something different: artists and curators have been cannibalizing education departments, making the pedagogical turn their own “unique” contribution to art and museums.2

    For Armstrong, the future of museum education involves “a more wholesale incorporation of technology,” citing his museum’s app, and responses to changing demographics. Curators also need empathy, he said. Chiu reported that discussions at a recent Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) meeting in Mexico City revolved around visitor experiences using social media and mobile technology.

    Concluding Thoughts

    While the blockbuster exhibition—from Treasures of Tutankhamun (1976–79) to The Art of the Motorcycle (1998–2003) to Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (1997–2003)—occupied the minds of many museum professionals at the close of the twentieth century, the subject surprisingly did not come up during tonight’s event. None of the panelists spoke about digitizing their collections and putting high-resolution images online for free academic use, nor did they discuss the ethics of improper deaccessioning, when museums sell works from their collections to fund operating expenses—a practice prohibited by both AAMD and the American Alliance of Museums.

    Armstrong, Chiu, and Finkelpearl are all figureheads who, as current and former museum directors, are experts at abstraction and delegation. Both granular details of running a museum and specifics about current projects aren’t easily conveyed in forums the one tonight, so the audience received sweeping overviews of the twenty-first-century museum landscape. Nevertheless, it was valuable to know what issues these figureheads felt were important enough to discuss.

    In Terms Of count: 11.

    1 See Colin Moyniham, “Protests Resume at Guggenheim over Abu Dhabi Museum,” New York Times, November 5, 2014; and ongoing coverage by various authors for Hyperallergic.

    2 See Michelle Jubin, “Museum Education and the Pedagogic Turn,” Artwrit (Summer 2011); Kristina Lee Podesva, “A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art,” Fillip 6 (Summer 2007); and Helen Reed, “A Bad Education: Helen Reed Interviews Pablo Helguera,” Pedagogical Impulse (publication date unknown).

    Watch

    The Asia Society has posted the video of “The Changing Landscape of Museums Today.”

  • Art Market Booming, Dealers Say

    This text is the second of three that reviews the first World Art Market Conference, held in 1976. Read the first and third reports.

    First World Art Market Conference
    Friday and Saturday, October 29–30, 1976
    New School of Social Research, New York

    Not only is art alive, it is thriving, was the assessment given by some of the nation’s foremost museum officials, art dealers, and artists to some four hundred persons at the first World Art Market Conference over the weekend. “Far from being less pertinent, the fine arts and the art museum will become more important,” Director Thomas P. F. Hoving of the Metropolitan Museum of Art declared.

    “If the art museum does harness the contemporary tools, techniques, and aesthetics of the very best aspects of communications, it can go beyond art education, art appreciation, and art history and can become the broadest and most powerful communicator in visual history,” Hoving continued. “This will most assuredly be the next great epoch of the art museum.

    However, Director Thomas Messer of the Guggenheim Museum said it will be possible only if museums get enough money to make acquisitions. They are made now, he added, mostly through borrowing, trading, and begging.

    One panel disagreed about the extent of artistic creativity, while another attributed the slump in the art market following the booming 1960s to a return to realistic prices. “I can say the market is on a solid trend now,” John Marlon, president of the prestigious Sotheby Parke Bernet auction house, reported at the New School for Social Research, which sponsored the conference with the ARTnewsletter periodical.

    Speaking of a surge of art interest in the South, dealer Louis Goldenberg, president of Wildenstein & Co., said he was “very, very surprised” at the growing number in the last half-year of private individuals’ buying art destined just for museums. “The market, the future for those museums, is absolutely enormous,” Clyde Newhouse, president of the Art Dealers Association of America, added.

    In another panel discussion, there was accord on New York City as the world’s art capital. But the prominent dealers who participated—among them New York’s Leo Castelli, Chicago’s Richard Gray, Houston’s Meredith Long, and Boston’s Portia Harcus—debated whether it was an art collecting center as well. “Where are the new collectors, then?” Castelli demanded. “Well, there aren’t any. They are mostly elsewhere.” Countered dealer André Emmerich of Manhattan and Zurich: “I think there still are collectors around, perhaps not as spectacularly as there once were.”

    As for new movements in art, Lawrence Rubin, codirector of M. Knoedler & Co., said, “It may very well be that the creation of art in the ’70s is slower, less dramatic.” It would not be the first time, he continued, that creation was at a pause. “The reason the ’70s look slower, it’s because they are slower,” Rubin said. Said Ruth Braunstein, director of San Francisco’s Quay Gallery, today’s artists “will emerge as strong a group as [those which] came out of the ’50s and ’60s.”

    Other panelists included artists Robert Indiana and Deborah Remington, plus George A. LeMaistre, director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), who foresaw an expanding, profitable role for banks in financing art.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Malcolm N. Carter, “Art Market Booming, Dealers Say” was published in the Morning Record, a newspaper based in Meriden-Wallingford, Connecticut, on November 1, 1976. The article was distributed nationwide through the Associated Press and appeared in numerous other dailies with headlines such as “Experts Feel Art Thriving,” “Conference Concludes Art Is Alive and Thriving,” and “World Art Conference Paints Rosy Picture.”

  • Speculate in Art? Not Us!

    This text is the first of three that reviews the first World Art Market Conference, held in 1976. Read the second and third reports.

    First World Art Market Conference
    Friday and Saturday, October 29–30, 1976
    New School of Social Research, New York

    Rereading this report [from Lynden B. Miller] in 1990, the notion of a “Last World Art Market Conference” comes to mind—what to do while the value of your collection bottoms out. Of course all this took place at the onset of gold fever, when it did not do to admit, at least in public, that one might indeed “speculate in art.”

    Speakers: Thomas Hoving, Milton Esterow, Thomas Messer, Leo Castelli, Ivan Karp, Ruth Braunstein, others, dealers

    Billed as “The First World Art Market Conference,” coproduced by the New School and ARTnewsletter—a biweekly hot-tip dispenser that you can pick up for a mere $60 a year—the show was, as John Everett, president of the New School, said in his opening remarks, about the “business of art.” It appeared to be mostly a media event. The press was given the three front rows, fussed over with TLC. Some four hundred others, dealers, and collectors from around the country, and a few artists hoping to learn about “business,” paid $200 each to see and hear the superstars of the art market. Those expecting a clear view of the crystal ball—specific investment advice—were disappointed. But they got lots of encouragement and word that the art market is very good these days.

    After the “welcoming continental breakfast,” Everett told us there’s money “itching” to be spent in art. Next, Milton Esterow, publisher of ARTnewsletter and ARTnews, cosponsor, and comoderator, earnestly assured us that those who make money on art buy for aesthetic reasons only—that you can’t make money speculating on art. Then we got down to the serious business of trying to find out how to do just that.

    Keynote speaker Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bounded onstage for a rapid-fire delivery of his optimistic view of the future of museums, now changing, he said, from passive displayers of art to active educators and conservators of art and culture (thus, not surprisingly, making a case for many of his own controversial changes at the Met).

    Then the august directors of such institutions as Wildenstein, Parke Bernet, and Christie’s sedately discussed trends in art-buying around the world, with an emphasis on pre-twentieth-century painting and sculpture and other art objects of increasing rarity, which, they agreed, will become even more expensive. Despite several years’ slump, it seems there is still a lot of money around for art, particularly in the US Southwest, Europe, and, more recently, Iran and the oil-producing countries. Esterow tried manfully to elicit some inside information on specific items or periods for investment, but to no avail.

    castellikarpwarhol
    The dealers Leo Castelli (left) and Ivan Karp (center) with Andy Warhol in 1966 (photograph by Sam Falk/New York Times)

    After lunch, Thomas Messer [of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum] spoke wittily of the museum director’s difficulties in maintaining the excellence of a collection without money, and his efforts to get same.

    The 2:30 PM panel discussion—with Leo Castelli, André Emmerich, Lawrence Rubin, and Ivan Karp of New York; Portia Harcus of Harcus-Krakow, Boston; Ruth Braunstein of Quay Gallery, San Francisco; Richard Gray of Gray Gallery, Chicago; and Meredith Long of Meredith Long & Co., Houston—was considerably livelier than the morning’s, and of greater interest to contemporary artists.

    Karp, in flame-red open-necked shirt and black leather jacket, a well-calculated contrast to the banker’s attire of his colleagues, began with a lament on the dearth of big-spending collectors while a wealth of exciting new art fails to sell, which brought howls of laughter and appreciation from the audience. Rubin, of Knoedler Gallery, and Emmerich said they found no exciting new art beating down their doors. There was also disagreement about the number of collectors, but it was clear from the discussion that there is a lot of money and art activity in what Castelli, with a wave of his hand toward the out-of-towners, referred to as “the provinces.” He said he himself is looking for “stars, not activity.”

    Ms. Braunstein noted that the New York dealers on the panel, except for Karp, are the “establishment,” so that perhaps little exciting new work comes to them. She said she finds much thrilling new work with new materials. She also asked Esterow why there were so few women participating, which drew applause from the audience, particularly the press section, which was predominantly female. Esterow was ready for that: “25 percent of art dealers are women; two out of eight panelists equals 25 percent.” (However he wasn’t quite so careful introducing the panel, having named first all the men in order down the table, and then the two women seated among them. It also bears noting that no woman artist was mentioned by name in the entire day, though Karp did use the phrase “his or her artistic temperament” to indicate that the artist is of two possible sexes.)

    The dealers seemed to agree that their major function is educational, as big sales are few and far between. All day there were pious protests from speakers that one would not, heaven forbid, speculate in art. Castelli finally reminded his fellow dealers that such folk do exist.

    The discussions would all have been more relevant and informative if moderators Esterow and Donald Goddard, managing editor of ARTnews, had asked better questions, or been more alert and articulate, or allowed some exchange with the audience. Nevertheless, Castelli’s reminiscences of the ’60s, when he was a kingmaker, were colorful; Rubin’s and Emmerich’s snobbery was piquant; Karp was hilarious, irreverent, and delightful, as when describing the “Hirshhorn Waltz”—an embrace from Mr. H. at the conclusion of a bargaining session. (All agreed that Joseph Hirshhorn was a keen bargainer.)

    What did the audience, exceeding in numbers [greater than] the sponsors’ fondest hopes, get for their tax-deductible $200? A simulated leather portfolio, suitably inscribed, crammed with promotional material for the New School and Parsons (now part of the New School), literature about New York City museums, advance copies of ARTnews, and, of course, ARTnewsletter, which, begun one year ago, circulates to one thousand dealers and collectors. A catered buffet, where perhaps the concrete information about investments and the market not coughed up by panelists and speakers was exchanged off the record. And a glimpse of the movers and shakers of the art market world.

    What did the sponsors get? $80,000 less costs. A lot of promotion with collectors and dealers, and, potentially, in forty-three organs of the press. Confirmation that there is indeed a lot of money “itching” to be spent on art, although perhaps not much in New York as there used to be. And proof that there are a lot of people itching to make money off the people making money off art.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Lynden B. Miller, “Speculate in Art? Not Us!” was originally published as “Art Business at the New School: World Art Market Conference” in Women Artists Newsletter 2, no. 7 (January 1977): 1, 4; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 47–48. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • The Art Talk That Ate New York

    What Price Art? The Economics of Art: An Agenda for the Future
    Friday, April 26, 1985
    New York University, Graduate School of Business Administration, New York

    Another ’80s workshop on spinning art into gold—and as motley a collection of speakers as one could imagine, even on such a fey topic. As it happens, my community and I recently had dealings with one of them—the representative from the Port Authority—only instead of “Arts as an Industry,” she detailed why our historic district should be trashed for the benefit of the Port Authority. That report, with figures and measurements and citations, was, as we proved in court, a complete fiction, but it served the purposes of those receiving it and became fact. Such diddling is of course hardly news in city politics—or in business and real estate either, as we see increasingly in the papers these days. But in art? Let’s just say the figures here sound official, for what that’s worth, but don’t bet the farm.

    On the other hand, at least from my limited experience, Alexandra Anderson-Spivy’s rundown on the workings of the art market can be taken as a marvel of acute reporting. That is, you’ll love it—and relish the hindsight.

    Cochairs: Kenneth Friedman, publisher of The Art Economist; and Oscar Ornati, professor of management, New York University

    Speakers: Noel Steinberger, Rosemary Scanlon, William Baumol, Michael Montias, A. D. Coleman, Dick Higgins, Ed McGuire, Martin Ackerman, Marshall Kogan, Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, and John Czepiel

    Cynthia Navaretta, “Conference: What Price Art?” Women Artists News 10, no. 4 (June 1985): 4.

    Titled “What Price Art,” and provocatively subtitled “The Economics of Art: An Agenda for the Future,” the conference promised to explore the economics of the visual arts market, with practical details on costs and price structure provided by “national experts in economics, finance, law, public policy, art and journalism.”

    Noel Steinberger, vice president of marketing at Sotheby’s, the world’s oldest auction firm, identified key players in the art game as the media, banks, auction houses, and galleries (notice omission of the artist).

    Rosemary Scanlon, a discussant and chief economist of the New York–New Jersey Port Authority, described her recent study, The Arts as an Industry, made to determine value and economic impact of cultural industries (including theater, dance, music, film, television, and visitors to New York City, but not the city’s art sales or art inventory) on the metropolitan area. Her “conservative” estimate was $5.6 billion. Although hard data is lacking, worldwide transactions in the visual art market are estimated at over $25 billion annually.

    Scanlon’s presentation was followed by floor discussion of the art customer. The important role of the press was briefly touched on as “shaping tastes and spending habits.” Recent studies estimate the number of US art critics at over 2,500; Art in America has counted more than 2,600 critics among its own subscribers. Assuming an equal number might not read AiA could bring the total number of art critics to more than 5,000.

    Dr. William Baumol, professor of economics at Princeton University, and a collector himself, described the art market as an “imperfect market,” i.e., not behaving in a predictable manner, as financial markets sometimes do not. Therefore, he said, “there is no rational way to assign value or to invest” (except, of course, on an aesthetic level). Price information, he said, is beside the point. An unidentified speaker contradicted him on that claim, asserting that price information is “needed for literacy and curiosity.” Baumol added that “the elasticity of supply” is zero for deceased artists and “the holder of a single piece of art has a monopoly on that item,” so the supply of art is fixed.

    Michael Montias, professor of economics at Yale University, rejected the inelasticity theory, claiming existence of a “large supply of paintings on walls, in attics, and museum basements.” New interests (and rising prices) in specific periods cause hitherto unknown works to surface.

    Cynthia Navaretta, “Conference: What Price Art?” Women Artists News 10, no. 4 (June 1985): 5.

    A. D. Coleman, photography critic, added that values change, using as example that van Gogh’s painting (auctioned the previous evening for $9.9 million) was no longer what van Gogh had painted; it has since been certified as a work of art.

    Dick Higgins, writer and artist, noted that “art is one of the only commodities routinely produced at a loss.”

    Ed McGuire added, “The artist does not profit by art, galleries do, museums do, and the collector who uses it as a tax shelter does.”

    Then the topic of whether or not art business and art galleries are profitable, or doing better than in previous years, was tossed around for a while. The editor of City Business quoted a dealer as saying, “A good dealer is one who breaks even and puts in his basement what he thinks will increase in value.” The director of the Berry-Hill Gallery dismissed this as nonsense, saying “any serious gallery” does very well financially.

    Martin Ackerman, attorney, addressed tax policies and changes in tax law by which the Internal Revenue Code says, in effect, that “in death the work of an artist is valued at appreciated retail value, but in life it is valued at the cost of material. This, obviously, has caused artists and their estates to liquidate or even destroy large portions of their work to avoid these unwarranted and unfair tax burdens.”

    With allowable tax deductions for donations of art restricted to “adjusted costs,” museums report drastic reductions in gifts from artists. The Whitney received 142 works in 1969 and 17 (of which 13 were prints) in 1970; MoMA received 47 in 1969, none in 1970. Although art collectors have not yet lost the privilege of this contribution, they frequently encounter hostile questioning by the IRS as to “fair market value.” (Ackerman believes this stems from a probably well-founded IRS belief that all contributions are overvalued.)

    Marshall Cogan, chief executive officer of GFI/Knoll Industries and noted collector, mentioned the amazing growth in museum attendance since the ’70s. He also pointed out that 875,000 people earned over one million dollars in 1985, suggesting that, as income rises, the value of art rises too. Cogan’s recommendation to collectors was to buy “the most extraordinary piece of work available.” He saw a decline in good works of art, attributing current “extreme increases in price” to this scarcity.

    John Czepiel, associate professor of marketing at New York University, quoted something he had read: “It ain’t art unless you have the urge to possess it.”

    Kenneth Friedman, cochair of the conference, summed up: “The art market is poised on the edge of profound change. This is a market moving from its cottage industry phase into something radically different. All other factors in the economy being equal, I predict that the dollar volume of the art market will increase at a rate far better than inflation during the next decade. If this is so, we’re going to need—and we’re going to see—studies in everything from client service by art dealers to credit financing for consumers, from information services, to investment opportunities in the art industry.”

    Perhaps, however, the clearest indicator of art’s new financial status is simply this conference itself. New York University’s School of Business hosted a conference on “art.” Footing all bills, it invited press, dealers, consultants, lawyers, collectors, and bankers to attend as its guests—but no artists.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “The Art Talk That Ate New York” was originally published as “Conference: What Price Art?” in Women Artists News 10, no. 4 (June 1985): 4–5; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 236–37. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Hitting Rock Bottom

    From the Bottom Up: Rethinking Art Galleries in a Commodity- and Event-Dominated Ecosystem
    Friday, March 7, 2014
    Armory Show, Open Forum, New York, NY

    “Welcome to the Armory Show TED Talks,” joked Christian Viveros-Fauné, a New York–based art critic who was the moderator of today’s panel. He said that everyone onstage for “From the Bottom Up: Rethinking Art Galleries in a Commodity and Event Dominated Ecosystem” is or was involved in exhibiting in a gallery situation or with an art fair, except for Georgina Adam, a columnist for the Financial Times and BBC.com and an editor-at-large for the Art Newspaper.[1] If only the panel had been, like a TED Talk, uplifting and inspirational. When the dust settled, the speakers neither established a historical assessment of the art fair’s ascendance over the past twenty years, nor did they interrogate—and I choose this word purposefully because of Viveros-Fauné recent cynical, under researched rants—the perceived state of the art market and art world.[2] While I recognize the panelists witnessed the rise of the art fair firsthand, their recollections of the recent past were grounded in anecdote, hearsay, and received wisdom.

    History of Art Fairs

    In 1970 art fairs took place in Cologne, Basel, and Antwerp, Viveros-Fauné claimed. By Viveros-Fauné’s count, 55 art fairs were held in 2001, 68 in 2005, 189 in 2011, and 300 in 2014. Galleries, which he said now number about 300,000 worldwide, need the art fair to sell work. I wondered where these figures came from and how a “gallery” is defined. The first Art Basel Miami Beach would have been held in December 2001, Viveros-Fauné recalled, but it was canceled because of September 11–related complications. An upstart group called Fast Forward couldn’t afford to back down that year and consequently hosted the “first” art fair in south Florida.[3] Viveros-Fauné and Kavi Gupta, director and owner of Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago and Berlin, participated in Fast Forward that year. “It grew exponentially overnight,” Gupta remarked. Collectors back then, he noted, were more enthused about finding new art than in securing investments. Adam said that she attended her first Miami art-fair week in 2003, watching from the sidelines as a reporter. The art-market boom, when collectors ran like greyhounds to the hot booths immediately after the fair gates opened to meet their prearranged five-minute reserve, took place through 2007. The Great Recession curtailed this heated contest, temporarily.

    Golden Years

    Viveros-Fauné asked the panelists to talk about those golden years. Darren Flook, cofounder of the Independent Art Fair and formerly director of HOTEL, a gallery he operated with Christabel Stewart, made his first appearance at Zoo Art Fair in 2004. His London gallery, located in a first-floor apartment, was visited only by other artists and magazine people. He did not meet collectors with cash until he showed at Zoo: “We didn’t know those kinds of people—doctors in Cologne, [various types of professionals] in Los Angeles—that didn’t come to East London.” Carlos Durán, the director and owner of Galeria Senda and a cofounder of LOOP, a fair for video art, entered the art world in Barcelona in 1992. His gallery eventually moved into the German and French art-fair circuit. “I’ve been watching this monster grow,” he said. “I’m part of the monster[’s] … foot.” The joke fell flat footed.

    The growth of art fairs has been rapid and marvelous over the first decade of the twenty-first century. Viveros-Fauné described the bidding wars over works of art, with people shouting higher prices over other people’s shoulders. “It was ridiculous—but it felt good at the time,” he said as he reminisced about his past life as an art dealer for Roebling Hall. He turned to Gupta and asked, “When did the idea for Volta come on?” After doing his first NADA fair, the Chicagoan replied. (They are talking about Volta in Basel, founded in 2005, not the New York event, first held in 2008. Volta in both cities focus on solo and two-person booths.) Gupta felt he was filling a need for galleries that were doing important things but hadn’t flagged the attention of patrons and museums. Viveros-Fauné asked him to describe the environment for galleries. At the time, Gupta responded, there was no Frieze Art Fair, and Art Basel was very small—primarily New York galleries showed there. Apartment galleries were gaining traction and attention, he remembered, as well as young galleries in Chelsea, Los Angeles, and London.

    Despite this first-hand knowledge of recent history, Viveros-Fauné and his speakers did little to establish the basic facts or a straight chronology for art fairs, pulling counts of galleries and fairs from thin air. Perhaps an intrepid scholar will take up the task, connecting our current situation to the Parisian salons and Refusé exhibitions of the late nineteenth century and to the Salon and Gallery Cubists of the early twentieth.

    Helen Allen, the founder and principal of Allen/Cooper Enterprises and Site/109, grounded her observations in the 1990s, an era when [younger] galleries were getting locked out of the bigger fairs. The Armory Show was founded by dealers rejected by the Art Dealers Association of America’s annual Art Show. The process is cyclical, and everyone tells the same story. The received wisdom is that galleries prove their reliability by showing up at art fairs for three consecutive years for face time with collectors. The art-fair model resembles the farm system of professional baseball: dealers play in several tiers of minor leagues before hitting the majors. Flook shared his experience putting together the Independent Art Fair, which he founded with the New York dealer Elizabeth Dee in 2009. Their approach was stripped down: Independent got rid of the sales catalogue (with phone numbers for galleries), the VIP benefits, and the walled booths and worked backward. The focus was on exhibiting art, and people like the approach and format.

    Viveros-Fauné asked his panelists about sales. How do they look now compared to 2002 or 2003? Flook said he sold work at the fairs but not from the gallery’s physical location. But, he added, dealers who sold out their booth were “talking about a mystical city far away,” as if this kind of economic success were a myth. “An El Dorado,” replied Viveros-Fauné. “With bad food,” Flook continued. “Rice and beans,” topped the critic. I understood this exchange to mean that dealers inflate their business activity at art fairs—they fake it till they make it. Half of Durán’s sales in 2008 came from his gallery, he said, and the other half from fairs. Now the percentage is 85/15—the fairs dominate. He mysteriously thinks this tendency will change, or he hopes it will change. Regardless, Durán has become more selective about the fairs he participates in, and further hones his program. Adam believes that art fairs should serve the dealer but that dealers cannot sustain the rigorous schedule of international events. “I’ve been told that galleries are pulling back,” she said. Flook knew that New York didn’t need another art fair but felt he had something to add to the dialogue. Allen pointed out the obvious: artists are pressured to produce work for fairs—gasp!

    Brick and Mortar Spaces

    Are we in the twilight of the brick-and-mortar gallery? Not yet. Allen confirmed that art fairs don’t accept exhibitors that don’t maintain a physical space. Flook argued that galleries are social, conversational, and idea-charged spaces that foreground the “placement of certain objects by individuals,” or something like that. When pressed by Viveros-Fauné, Flook said that the Independent would accept a group without a gallery as long as that group had a social structure, whether online or off, that generated dialogue.

    At fairs, art is seen for four days, or as a JPEG, Viveros-Fauné disclosed, before it enters the collector’s castle. He wondered where if dialogue is happening there. As a journalist, Adam doesn’t write about art fairs, whose crowded booth format and brief encounters with objects “put enormous demands on viewers.” Perhaps she hasn’t been to Chelsea lately, where visitors may spend all of two minutes viewing a show before strolling to the next gallery. The most important aspect of fairs, she concluded, is a dealer choosing to represent an artist shown by another dealer. Unpacking this echo chamber of consensus would take some time. Flook made an asinine claim that “art is an expensive product no one really needs,” taking an incredibly narrow view of art.

    Most people would agree that art fairs are hamster wheels—so much energy is expended for so little yield. Someone brought up an article by Adam Gopnik—actually written by his brother Blake—that quoted the former art dealer Nicole Klagsbrun: “stop it.”[4] What can the lovers and sellers of art do? Allen described friends who are closing their gallery to start a residency (and also placing their artists with other galleries). Artists are getting into museum shows as a result. Flook witnessed the spectacular bust of a gallery (what it his own?). But with “a certain affection for empty buildings,” he cannot help but to fantasize about their potential when looking through the windows of them when walking by them. He pondered aloud about running a business without making money. “I wish,” fawned Viveros-Fauné wistfully, “there were more of you.”

    Financial Speculation

    Allen commented (again) on the love of art versus buying for investment, but there is money to be made and attention to seek. Art magazines have advertisements from not only galleries but also “BMW commercials and fashion commodity,” she said. Publications, however, have accepted publicity dollars from nonart business for decades. Viveros-Fauné affirmed Allen’s notion of art as financial instrument, finding a correlation between the financial and art worlds, which is “the huge, massive elephant” in the room. Adam linked luxury goods such as haute couture to the top end of the art market, where “there you’ve got commodification—there’s no doubt. The question is how you deal with it.” Viveros-Fauné also cited a rise in art crime as an indication of pecuniary worth, without providing police reports. Adam noted an increase in art litigation. Viveros-Fauné said that the public looks at us [who?] as the 1 percent, no matter how wonderful everyone on the panel is. Speculation has been an art-world subject for over sixty years—if not longer—and the panelists talk about it as if it were something new.

    The panel has identified the problematic areas—really!—and then discussed the changes that must be made. A recent Huffington Post article “paints a really bleak picture,” Viveros-Fauné cried. We complain about a model that works, Gupta said. What about a return to art for art’s sake? “I don’t know,” Gupta conceded. Viveros-Fauné demanded that art should not be sold to speculators or to people younger than thirty-five years of age. What a meanie he is, with all those rules!

    Durán said there are significant issues with big galleries, when an artist’s career rises. Viveros-Fauné wondered what happens to the middle tier, as if he was a politician wooing middle-class votes. Allen said that middle-tier galleries close when bigger galleries poach their artists. What happens, she asked, when artists are asked to represent a country [in an international biennial]? Can a small or mid-sized gallery come up with $300,000 to fund the project? I wonder why an invitation to exhibit in a major international showcase doesn’t come with funding for the artist, or if artists at such a high level must still work for exposure.

    In many businesses in America, people change jobs regularly. Say I work for a company for five years and get a better offer for my services somewhere else. Do I take that job, which has more money and better opportunities? Why is it an ethical issue when an artist jumps ship? Does employment by art galleries offer the same kind of job security and opportunities for promotion that a corporation does? When you think about it, have artists ever been company or union men? Flook said job-hopping happens so quickly, so often, and that younger artists just don’t understand why some old guy would have a moral or ethical issue with this. Artists have a “corporation me” attitude that was unthinkable twenty years ago. Yet, Flook conceded, “You can’t really argue against it.” Applications for art fairs cost big bucks, which steer the odds toward the bigger gallery, which will win. Again, a myopic understanding of business world that pretty much anyone with a job is a part of fails because the art-world folks can’t see beyond their little sphere.

    A self-identified businessman and art collector in the audience said whether it was art or a cheeseburger, he wants “relative value” for his money. The art fair, he continued, is a remarkably inefficient way to acquire art—but didn’t explain why. He wants art and access to artists (I think), but he doesn’t want to run in and out of galleries. It seemed like collecting wasn’t exactly a leisure activity for him. Gupta said that fairs are filtering systems run by the people who spend time with art twenty-four/seven. But he also encouraged collectors to visit alternative and artist-run spaces. Keeping up with contemporary art takes a lot of time.

    Possible Solutions (Again)

    Flook wondered what success is and how do we measure it. Value self-corrects itself, he said. Okay. The artist Theaster Gates does marvelous things with money, Viveros-Fauné said, working on projects that don’t always produce objects for sale via Gupta’s gallery. It’s an interesting model for people to wrap their head around, he marveled, seemingly unaware of the rich history of dealers, gallerists, and curators, from Seth Siegelaub to Robert Nickas, who have long operated as art dealers without a gallery. Others, such as Virginia Dwan, John Gibson, and Howard Wise, have found a way to sell art made outside, and can’t be presented in, the white cube. Progressive minds in the early 1970s were predicting the end of brick-and-mortar spaces, yet today’s dealers continue to marvel at the potential of the idea.[5] I am not suggesting that an art dealer needs to know the history of the business, but commercial art galleries are not terribly old—one hundred years or so, right? The historical amnesia exhibited by the panelists was astounding.

    Durán said Brazilian galleries are sharing costs instead competing against each other. Perhaps galleries can run careers like the music industry, he offered, presumably like agents and managers instead of record companies, whose twentieth-century business models have floundered over the past fifteen years. In a conservative move, Durán suggested people become antiglobal and get back to their roots, cultivating audiences for your shows, returning to the good old days of slow culture that had disappeared with the rise of the art-fair monster. Allen mumbled something about travel, the internet, phones, always being connected, and having to respond immediately. People today don’t experience experiences in person: “They’re looking at sunsets through the Instagram app,” she astutely and stunningly observed. Flook countered by saying that, in his personal survey, people won’t pay for songs and films but will shell out $200 for a live show. Or $40 for an art fair, which is this year’s admission for the Armory Show.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    [1] The panel was presented by an organization called Talking Galleries, the International Platform for Gallerists.

    [2] See, for example, Christian Viveros-Fauné, “How Uptown Money Kills Downtown Art,” Village Voice, February 6, 2013; and “Art’s Big, Dirty Secret,” Village Voice, January 1, 2014.

    [3] Fast Forward, Kavi Gupta and Viveros-Fauné claimed, evolved into the New Art Dealers Association, or NADA.

    [4] Blake Gopnik, “Great Art Needs an Audience,” Art Newspaper, February 13, 2014. For more on Nicole Klagsbrun closing her gallery, see Charlotte Burns, “Nicole Klagsbrun to Close Gallery after 30 Years in the Business,” Art Newspaper, March 28, 2013.

    [5] The April 1971 issue of Arts magazine devoted its entire editorial content to galleries to describe their approach, strategies, and thoughts.

    Read

    Charlie Finch, “Survival Strategies,” Artnet, January 12, 2009.

    Steven Zevitas, “The Things We Think and Do Not Say, or Why the Art World Is in Trouble,” Huffington Post, February 28, 2014.